Gurugram: From working as an office assistant and doing odd jobs for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to becoming Haryana chief minister months before assembly elections, former Kurukshetra MP and Other Backward Class (OBC) leader Nayab Singh Saini’s rise has been meteoric.
Last week, 54-year-old Saini, a loyalist of former Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, took oath as the state’s new CM and won the floor test in the Haryana assembly. The change at the helm came a couple of months before two major elections in the state — the general election in May and the assembly elections in October.
For Saini, who was made the state BJP chief in October last year, being made the 11th chief minister of the state marks a significant leap in his political career. Soon after Saini was sworn in, Khattar said his association with the new CM went back to the mid-90s, when the latter was an assistant at the party’s Panchkula office. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in charge of the party’s affairs in Haryana around this time.
“He (Saini) used to type letters and perform chores like preparing office records and correspondence,” Khattar told the media last week.
According to a BJP insider, Saini was so devoted to Khattar that he would frequently volunteer to drive the car when the latter had to travel.
Political analysts believe that the BJP’s decision to replace Khattar with Saini months before assembly elections has two aims — to beat anti-incumbency in the state after two terms of the BJP government and to help win over the state’s OBC votes.
Although there is no authentic data on caste-wise population in Haryana, various estimates put the state’s OBC or backward class population at 40 percent.
The decision also came when the BJP government led by Modi was facing protests from farmers over their demand for a law guaranteeing Minimum Support Price, a market intervention that provides the minimum rate at which farmers could sell their crops to the government. Although these protests are mostly by farmers in Punjab, Haryana farmer associations have condemned what they claim is harsh police action against these protesters.
According to political analyst Mahabir Jaglan, the gamble of appointing Saini to amass the state’s backward classes’ votes may not work.
Saini, he said, wasn’t from the artisan classes of backward castes who were considered poor and socially backward, but from the dominant agrarian castes such as Yadavs, Gujjars, and Kamboj. Although these caste groups are on Haryana’s list of socially and educationally backward classes, they are considered to be better off than many others.
“Ever since Rahul Gandhi started demanding a caste census, the BJP became wary of the OBCs shifting towards the Congress. But this may not work as the BJP thinks. Artisanal castes among the backward classes are much higher in number than the agrarian backwards like Yadav, Saini, Lodhi, Gujjar, Meo, and Goasain, and they may not vote with the latter,” he said, adding that besides this, some sections of the society, such as farmers, are unhappy with the BJP over its policies and not merely against Khattar personally.
BYJM to Haryana BJP president — Nayab Singh’s rise
OBC leader Nayab Singh Saini was born in Ambala’s Mirzapur Majra village on 25 January, 1970, making him the first CM to be born after an independent state of Haryana was carved out of the undivided Punjab in 1966.
His father Telu Ram was an ex-serviceman and a small farmer, and his mother Kulwant Kaur was a homemaker.
Saini has a BA degree from Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar Bihar University and a degree in law from Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut. In November 2022, Saini’s wife Suman unsuccessfully contested the Zila Parishad election.
The couple has two children, a son, Aniket, who’s pursuing a degree in law from Chandigarh, and a daughter, Anshika, a student of Class 12 in a Chandigarh school.
In 2002, Saini was appointed the district general secretary of BJP’s youth wing, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM). He became BJP’s Ambala district president in 2012.
The CM contested his first assembly elections from Naraingarh in 2009. Although that attempt was unsuccessful and the BJP leader came in fifth with only 7 percent votes, he once again contested, and won, from the same seat in 2014, beating sitting Congress MLA Ram Kishan by over 24,000 votes.
In the 2019 parliamentary polls, the BJP fielded him from Kurukshetra, a constituency where its sitting MP Raj Kumar Saini rebelled in 2018 and floated his outfit, the Loktantra Suraksha Manch. Nayab Saini beat his nearest rival, Congress’s Nirmal Singh, by over 31 percent votes.
In October 2023, the BJP appointed Saini as its Haryana president, replacing O.P. Dhankar.
“Saini comes from a middle-class family, not too rich but not too poor. He has always been down-to-earth, regardless of what he’s attained in politics,” Rajesh Ratoura, a former Ambala district BJP president whose association with Saini goes back to 2002, told ThePrint over the phone.
According to poll-watchdog Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), Saini’s affidavit in 2009 showed he and his wife Suman together had Rs 83 lakh worth of assets — Rs 45.05 lakh movable and Rs 38 lakh immovable assets — while his wife had jewelry worth Rs 1.75 lakh and a house worth Rs 3 lakh at Naraingarh.
In 2014, the couple’s assets rose by Rs 10 lakh to Rs 93.18 lakh.
Neither of these affidavits showed liabilities. However, his affidavit for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections showed that he had Rs 3.57 crore in assets — including a 300-sq yard house in Panchkula — and Rs 57 lakh in liabilities.
This is an updated version of this report
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)